


in the wild wild wailing

by violentdarlings



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Brainwashing, Dubious Consent, Episode: s12e21 There's Something About Mary, F/M, Missing Scene, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 08:25:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13003758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: Who stitched up Mary's hand?My money's on Ketch.





	in the wild wild wailing

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Blue, Blue Caravan' by Vienna Teng.
> 
> Warnings: dub con, medical, mind control.

Arthur hadn’t received permission to be part of the group who took Mary out on her first kill after Antonia began the programming. Nor had he asked to. He has no desire for one of Hess’s little barbs about him going soft, about how he _favours_ women he’s put his dick in. None of that, thank you very much. He contents himself with finding one of the few rooms on base without a camera and pacing to his heart’s satisfaction. It doesn’t do much good, but short of killing, it’s the best he has.

Eight hours after they take Mary out – Arthur’s pacing worn down to sitting at his desk attempting to do paperwork – he hears that she’s back. Arthur gives it another twenty-six minutes, because it would not do to be seen too soon, before he stands, dons his suit jacket, and strides down to Mary’s cell.

He only intends on strolling past to gauge the situation, but he hears the commotion before he sees it. The door to Mary’s cell is open, and she is chained at the wrists and ankles, sitting on the bunk. There is a tech trying to sew up a gash on her hand, but she’s fighting him tooth and nail, as is her wont. Arthur stands in the doorway, observes the scene.

Mary claws her nails down the man’s face, and blood wells up. “Feral bitch,” the tech snarls, his back still to Arthur, and raises a hand.

Arthur steps forward and catches the tech’s wrist in his own. He tightens his hold until he can feel bones crunching beneath his grip and the man is whimpering like a child.

“Ketch –” he gasps, struggling. Arthur smiles. It’s his Ketch smile. It’s not kind.

“Would you like me to be the one who informs Doctor Hess of your attempt to harm an asset?” he inquires, his voice silky smooth. “Or would you care for that honour yourself?”

The man is blanching. Ketch sighs, and lets his wrist go. Sometimes, it’s really too easy. “Get out,” he advises. “Make yourself scarce, and the good doctor will not hear of it from me.” It’s a lie, of course. The cameras will inform her well enough, but Ketch is not stupid; of course he will mention it.

The man scarpers, and Mary is still thrashing. Ketch looks down at her, but her eyes are blank; he doubts he even knows she’s there.

The tech has left his case behind. Ketch sits down on the abandoned stool, draws up a syringe of mild sedative, and scoots the stool in close to Mary, wrapping an arm around her flailing ones, drawing her back against his chest until she has nowhere to go. “This will sting,” he tells her, and for a moment she stills, as though recognising his voice, although the moment does not last. Ketch sighs, and injects the sedative into the muscle of her upper arm.

Intramuscular is safer than intravenous, but it works slower; Ketch has to keep Mary restrained for a good three minutes more before she sags in his arms. The drug will make her complicit, but is not a paralytic; when Ketch releases her cautiously, she remains upright, although her eyelids are fluttering shut.

He doesn’t mind. It will make the next part easier.

Ketch draws up a second syringe, attaches a fine needle, and sets to work numbing the area around the gash on Mary’s palm. Hands are delicate – he has no doubt Mary, in her right mind, could manage stitching her own arms or legs, but hands… it is probably best he is here.

Ketch learned to stitch wounds at Kendrick’s, when he was young; perhaps twelve when he started his medical training. He had an aptitude for it, and it was not so uncommon, in those days, for students to be put to work stitching their own minor wounds from their martial arts training. Arthur has sewn up more of his own knife injuries than he can name, and he usually does it without anaesthetic.

But Mary. Mary he does not want to hurt.

The wound is not too bad; it needs no more than ten or so stitches. He cleanses it first, then begins, his hands deft and patient, Mary unresisting. He does not talk to her as he does so; for one, the camera will pick up everything he says, and two, he has not been given permission to speak to her. Warning her that the injection would sting is one thing; she is in the thick of her programming, and a sudden, unexpected pain could be enough to set her off. But saying the things he truly wants to say; _you are doing so well, it will not be longer now, I cannot bear to see you thus –_

That is a different matter entirely.

When he is finished, he covers his work with a waterproof bandage, and surveys his patient. Mary is covered in blood, from the scarlet splashes on her clothes and skin to the dried reddish-brown matting her hair. He knows the usual procedure for an asset returning from a kill; dress wounds, wash, change clothes. He does it himself, every time he comes back from a hunt. He knows that Antonia prefers her subjects to remain in the same clothes, though, to further disorient them and take away the ability to measure time that different clothes provide.

Antonia, the eternal thorn in his arse. Mixed metaphors aside.

The shower is down the hall. Arthur regards Mary for a moment, then hauls her over his shoulder. Carrying her bridal style could be read as a sign of weakness, but she is too valuable to be dragged.

(Is he accustomed to it, this constant assessment of threat and behaviour? Yes. Does he find it wearisome? Perhaps.)

She’s leaving blood all over his Hugo Boss suit, but it hardly matters. She’s lighter than the last time he was able to gauge her weight ( _thighs astride his hips, breasts brushing his chest, wicked grin and flashing eyes, come on, Ketch, you’re not done yet, are you?)_ “Afternoon, Jones,” he says as he walks past one of the intelligence staff. The woman stares at him all the way down the hall; Arthur can feel the itch of her gaze on his back. This will be back to Hess by the time he’s done. Still, it’s procedure.

He finds Paige coming out of the locker room attached to the communal shower area. “Excellent,” he tells her briskly, entering the door and setting Mary down on a bench. “Mary’s clothes will be waiting outside the door in five minutes. Have them washed and dried in half an hour, and returned to the same location. Also, inform Doctor Hess I will report to her once I am finished here.”

“Mr. Ketch –” the girl begins, probably to argue. Arthur raises an eyebrow (his left, to be precise) and the girl falls quiet. He knows she’s seen the tapes of him torturing shifters, werewolves, demons – she is aware he is not to be questioned, not without consequences.

“Half an hour, Paige,” he says again, and closes the door in her face.

Arthur goes about stripping Mary with cold, clinical precision. He removes his own suit jacket and waistcoat, hanging them neatly over a rail, and rolls up the sleeves of his dress shirt. Mary is sitting, still chained, still staring into nothingness. Arthur retrieves his lockpicks from his trouser pocket and has the locks open in under five minutes.

It takes him a further three to steel himself enough to start undressing her. He begins with her jacket, then her thin white jumper splattered with blood, and finally lifts her undershirt over her head. Her bra is plain white, functional, the same one she’d worn the night they’d fallen into bed together.

_(Ketch? Are you coming?)_

“Mary,” he tells her gently, as gently as he knows how, which he is well aware is not remotely gentle at all. He can feign gentlemanly behaviour well enough, can sheathe his jagged edges in an outward veneer of calmness, although often he feels like he is barely holding the façade together by a thread. “I’m going to take off your brassiere. Is that all right?”

The tech, he knows, would have stripped Mary roughly, without deference to her humanity. Arthur does not want to be like that. At least there are no cameras in here, the British Men of Letters have some minute regard for their employees by not filming them showering. Still, the work needs doing, so he gently unhooks the bra and sets it aside.

Mary’s nipples are already peaking into hard buds form the cool air. Arthur swallows, looks away despite himself, his cock thickening a little in his suit trousers. He goes quicker on her jeans and knickers, steps away for a moment to dump the clothes outside the door. Paige is there, anxiously awaiting him. “Sir, it’s impossible to get these washed and dry in half an hour –”

Arthur closes the door in her face.

He takes Mary by the arm, guides her over to the stall. Much like the showers at Kendrick’s, the stalls have no doors. He turns the water onto warm and plonks her underneath the spray, waiting for her do something. She stands there, shoulders hunched, arms wrapped around herself protectively.

Arthur can’t look at it for long.

He goes to his locker, pulls out his bag of toiletries, and comes back. “Mary, wash your hair,” he prompts, holding out the bottle.

Mary doesn’t even look up.

Arthur sighs and unhooks the spray nozzle on its long hose, and sets the bottle of shampoo aside. He runs the water over her hair, easing his fingers into her blonde waves, working out the dried blood. Mary makes a soft, quiet noise, only audible because Arthur is concentrating on her so acutely. It might be pleasure, or it might be distress – Arthur is not very good at determining the difference, he mostly uses facial expressions or comments of outright disdain to cotton on to what emotion is in play.

He hooks the shower nozzle back up, letting the water rain gently down onto Mary’s head, and picks up the shampoo. He works it into her hair, the red slowly easing away, and Mary seems to lean into the touch.

The last time Arthur had his hands in her hair, Mary had been peering up at him with bright, wicked eyes as she dipped her head, taking his cock in her mouth.

Arthur shifts, and tries to think unsexy thoughts. Hess naked. Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day. It doesn’t help.

He rinses out the shampoo, taking care to shield her eyes, and turns away to retrieve the conditioner. When he turns back, his heart sinks somewhere to around his knees.

Tears are dripping silently down Mary’s face, almost obscured by the water. Arthur has the brief, idiotic urge to take her in his arms, without regard for her nudity or his suit or the fact that her sanity is holding by a fragile thread, without a thought for the danger if someone walks in and finds him cradling her in his arms. He throttles the urge, and lifts the showerhead to rinse out the shampoo from her hair. If it has the secondary effect of disguising the tears, Arthur is intent on not acknowledging it.

“Mary, Mary, Mary,” he tuts gently. “Don’t cry. Please don’t.” With infinite care, he tries to dot away the tears on her cheeks, but more keep falling.

He doesn’t know what to do. So he conditions her hair, washes every inch of her clean with his own soap, and guides her out the shower, drying her off with his own towel. Mary huddles into herself, her hair dripping, letting Arthur towel her off. But when he draws closer to dry her hair, she looks up.

“Towel smells like Ketch,” she rasps. Arthur freezes.

“He… sent me,” he tells her, as quietly as he can. If she recognises that it is Arthur himself is with her, Mary gives no sign of it. All the better, for her not to remember. One less thing for her to lose to Antonia and her chemicals. “To make sure you were all right.” Mary sniffs.

“I’m afraid,” she whispers. Arthur dries her thoroughly, trying to ignore the persistent erection in his trousers just from touching her bare. If there was ever any doubt that there is something profoundly wrong with him, the fact that he can get hard from touching a woman unable to consent is enough to convince him.

“I know,” he says.

By the time he escorts her out of the bathroom, Arthur is Ketch again, his face impassive, Mary shuffling behind him in her chains. Paige has pulled some miracle with a washing machine and so Mary is dressed again, her hair drying into fluffy waves. Being clean, though, does nothing to distract from the shadows under her eyes, or their redness from tears.

The tech is waiting sheepishly outside Mary’s cell. “Ketch –” he begins; Ketch doesn’t even bother to look at him.

“See her properly fed and returned to her cell, and for God’s sake remove her chains,” he snaps, and hands Mary over to the other man without so much as glancing at her in goodbye.

It breaks Arthur a little, but Ketch doesn’t even flinch.

He finds the nearest bathroom, locks the door behind him, and brutally takes care of the irritant that is his arousal. Arthur drops his trousers to around his knees, grips himself firmly, and tries to think of better times; Antonia, when they were both young and considerably less jaded, other women he’s fucked over the years, even Mick, one Men of Letters Christmas party where they’d been nearly too drunk to stand and had exchanged sloppy hand jobs in a broom closet.

None of it helps. All he can come back to is Mary, nude under the shower, exquisitely imperfect, from the stretchmarks of her pregnancies to the dark fuzz under her arms. Arthur groans into his fist, working his cock furiously, trying to get it over with as soon as possible but his mind is less cooperative, lingering over images of Mary in the water, her eyes closed. She could almost be enjoying herself under the spray, if Arthur ignores the blood and the bruises on her skin.

(A dark part of him relishes the blood and the bruises. It’s becoming harder every day to pretend to himself he’s anything like a good man.)

He comes sharply, fighting the urge to gasp, flinching from the footsteps in the hall. It’s painful. It’s the best orgasm he’s had in weeks.

 

When Ketch exits, he is impeccably pressed, every hair in place, and no one could ever dream that five minutes prior Arthur had been wiping sweat from his brow and biting back gasps. His suit is back to flawless perfection, his expression is smooth, and Ketch is ready to face the music.

When he enters the command room, Hess does not look up from where she is examining a file. “I did not ask you to attend to the prisoner,” she clips out, staring up at a screen. Ketch does not feel the urge to scowl at her back. Not even a little.

“If you will send staff who are incapable of doing the job, then I will intervene as I must,” he retorts. “The man was about to strike her. Antonia has previously stated she is not to be harmed outside of her sessions. Would you prefer next time I allow her progress to be set back?”

Hess turns at that. Her lips are compressed to a thin line. He has her. “Do not test me, Mr. Ketch,” she warns; she barely waits for his nod in reply before returning to her perusal of her screens.

Ketch knows she does not like it when men disobey her orders. He also knows that sometime, probably quite soon, he’ll pay for speaking back to her.

But then again, it’s not the only bill that he’s sure is about to come due.


End file.
